Mathematics for the interested outsider

XKCD… WTF?

The title seems especially ill-chosen. I mean, I know that Randall’s not a doctor of linguistics, but he’s usually pretty on the ball. Clearly he can’t mean the title as a normative statement, but he also has to understand that “how it works” will commonly parse as “how it should work”. The fact that there’s no comeuppance for the jerk doesn’t help here. Without further comment, it’s easy to read the comic as an endorsement of this attitude.

The other thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that the guy on the left is not a clearly-defined character we all know to be unpleasant already. Yes, I know this is arguing semiotics, but there’s a reason Goofus and Gallant comics are so easily read: a generic character will be interpreted as a generic person. Their behavior is then also taken as generic. Putting the Hat Guy in there would go a long way towards making this not seem like an endorsement.

And then the details are off. The characters are looking at a calculus problem. I don’t know anyone — at least any instructor — in this day and age who thinks like this at the calculus level. As far as I know, the psychological damage is usually done by this point. The attitude comes in during grade-school, so an arithmetic problem (and younger characters at the board) would be more appropriate. That is, unless Randall is asserting that this attitude is endemic (remember generic character => generic person) among calculus instructors.

In that case I really have to disagree with him on the strongest possible terms. But again, there’s no further comment, and the whole thing just feels disappointing as a result.

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I claim that both students have written on the board
(the limits of integration are just too small to see), and therefore it’s actually the instructor who sucks at math. (Let’s ignore the fact that there’s no dx in the integral.)

Also, I know plenty of guys with long hair. And girls with short hair.

Here’s my interpretation. A guy sees another guy screw up, it’s something specific about that guy. A guy sees a girl screw up, and immediately generalizes to all women. It’s generic because it’s the formula for generic male sexism. That hat guy would be the wrong choice because he’s coolly evil, like a Bond villain. This is uncool evil.

I’m not a faithful reader of XKCD, but I took this installment (skeletal as it was) as a very ironic statement. I interpreted “How It Works” pretty automatically as “The Way Things [Often] Are”, without the slightest suggestion of endorsement.

The figure on the left in each panel is some guy (not necessarily an instructor, or at least that wasn’t indicated to me) who makes a presumably correct observation about a particular individual when the individual is male, but then incorrectly generalizes when the individual is female. So the cartoon is a meta-observation on the reasoning skills of the figure on the left. (How endemic the attitude is among males is debatable, but it’s all too common, and that’s all I took Randall to be suggesting.)

I’d agree that the calculus per se is cartoonishly presented and arguably inept (like most math in cartoons, or the kinds of chessboard positions you see in furniture store advertisments). Perhaps that’s disappointing, as I take it that Randall is generally mathematically savvy.

Man, PCness really has you scared into thinking people are idiots. I sincerely believe most people will understand this comic as criticism of common sexist attitudes, not as recommending sexism in any way. I don’t know what sort of people you hang out with, but the people I know, and specifically the ones who read xkcd, would not misconstrue the comic in the way you suggest.

I hope I’m not being naive when I recommend to you to have a little more faith in people…

John, I believe xkcd’s article was an example of comic irony. As the wikipedia article states, a classic example of such is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”.

The fact that the sexist attitude was held by an utterly ordinary male adds to the (unfortunately) ironic truth of the message: these sorts of cognitive biases can be unconsciously present in otherwise decent people.

If only I didn’t have to write this exam and teach, I’d have more to say now. For the moment, I’ll leave it that there are a number of interpretations, and something about the vagueness of the comic as drawn unnerves me. Full deconstruction will have to wait until later, though.

Omar: I didn’t say that it was recommending sexism. I very explicitly said that I’m sure he didn’t mean it as a normative statement. Again, it’s the vagueness that bugs me.

Mgccl: You must learn the fun of playing with ideas and abstractions. Someone could just as easily say to you, “it’s just math” or “it’s just a computer program”.

XKCD could have gone on to show two more frames, one where a guy gets a hard problem right and a girl gets the same hard problem right with the following captions: “wow, you’re good at math” and “wow, who gave you that answer?”

It’s also broadly true of of any field that is dominated by some cultural group. Any would-be practitioner in the field from a different cultural group faces an uphill battle, as an unwitting representative.

John, I hereby challenge you to find another calculus-educated human being who sees that comic and actually interprets it as an endorsement of the attitude of the character on the left. (Note that I said “interprets it as…”, not “believes that somewhere in the universe there might be someone else who interprets it as…”)

What I find almost as strange is your assumption that the character on the left is an instructor, rather than a classmate or maybe a schoolmate who fairly recently took the same class. I mean, I realize that certain calculus instructors at the college level view their students with some contempt, but I sure don’t think that it’s common practice for them to say aloud, “Wow, you suck at math,” when one of their students writes something nonsensical.

I realize that certain calculus instructors at the college level view their students with some contempt

Which, in my mind, is just bad a background assumption as “girls are bad at math” or “people thing girls are bad at math”. Part of the reason that it works is because people are so willing to assume that instructors think badly of their students.

Walt beat me to it, so I’ll just add my name to the list of people echoing/recapitulating his take on it. TT and TT put it better than I would, but here are some rambling thoughts anyway.

I’m not sure that “how it works” parses as “how it should work” but perhaps North American idiom differs in this respect from the UK. I do agree that the title is unnecessarily vague/ambiguous: perhaps“so it goes” would have been more accurate, if a little fatalistic. But I think the presence of the left hand frame for comparison is enough to stop this particular installment from being read as a prescription (it’s the juxtaposition that shows up the right-hand frame as crass).

Maybe Randall should have shown an induction proof (done wrong) instead? Or would that be too self-referential?

Interesting comments re the calculus setting being off — I hadn’t thought of that. (Tho’ the damage may have been done by then, as you suggest, I think similar attitudes can still have a harmful effect all through the undergraduate stage, based on what little I observed of my own cohort.)

Here’s an analogous usage to the (mis)reading of “How It Works”: assembly instructions. “Here’s how the parts fit together.” There’s a definite normative statement in that context, in that the author intends the reader to follow the example set by the text.

In the comic, I know from my outside knowledge of Randall that he does not intend a normative statement. But the analogy with instructions is a little too clear for my taste.

While I pretty much agree with Walt et al., I do find something unsettling about the comic.

When I first look at it, before reading anything, I have no clues to tell me whether to trust the bald guy. He’s just a generic character — heck, I don’t even know it’s a “him” — and I start by giving him the benefit of the doubt. Then I read, see the appalling behavior, and cringe a little that I “trusted” him.

But I think that makes the comic more interesting. After all, real people don’t come with signs to tell you whether they can be trusted.

I don’t understand your complaint… I saw the comic is a twist on the sexism that’s usually prevalent in psychological theories (not that they are sexist theories, but that most of the theories describe how the different sexes are treated differently). The comic is distilled sexism.

But no, ‘the way is works’ means, ‘how it happens,’ or ‘the way that it is working,’ with no endorsement to the sexism… In fact, pointing it out in a comical and blunt manner that would be showing the absurdity of some people’s judgements, and would be anything but endorsing the concept…

I agree with #30. The comic shows how sexist attitudes “work”, in other words how they look in real life.

It also makes the excellent point that the first members of *any* minority group entering a new field are going to be viewed as representing their whole group, and particularly the whole group will be blamed for any perceived (or real) failings of the individual. For instance, if a male professor flames out and comes nowhere near earning tenure, “we should never have hired him”, where when a female professor does the same thing, you are all too likely to hear “we should never have hired a woman.”

On the flip side, I often see women in math/science saying “Oh, I suck” when a man in the same situation would be much more likely to say something like “Oh, this sucks.” That is, women more often blame themselves for their challenges while men blame something external (the particular problem, the poor teaching, or whatever).

To take at offense at this is to misinterpret it. It’s pointing out the stupid societal tendency to see men as individuals and judge them on individual merit and to lump women into a group. It’s pointing out that the fact that the INDIVIDUAL woman is bad at math does not mean that all women are.

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